LIKE MANY Catholics, my firm connection to the church is centrally a
matter of the Eucharist. The sacred meal of the Mass, affirming the ongoing
presence of Jesus Christ, feeds a gnawing hunger for meaning and hope.
At a time when church leaders themselves so gravely undercut the meaning
of the faith and sow reasons for despair, the Mass, ironically, seems
more essential than ever. This may explain why Mass attendance apparently
is up, even in troubled parishes. We Catholics have never needed our good
priests more.

The way Catholics now receive communion at Mass offers an object lesson
in the deeper significance of the current crisis. It used to be that those
approaching the communion rail would kneel and, tilting their heads back
and opening their mouths, they would offer their tongues onto which the
priest - only a priest - would place a consecrated wafer.

We never gave this procedure a thought until, with the reforms of Vatican
II in the late 1960s, it changed. No more kneeling. No more outstretched
tongues. No more communion rail, even: What had been an effective barrier
between sanctuary and church was removed. Now lay people as well as priests
distribute communion. Now Catholics receive the sacred bread in their
hands, to place it in their mouths themselves.

This subtle reform has tremendous significance and contemporary relevance,
for it means that Catholics are no longer infantilized by a feeding gesture
appropriate only to small children. The kneeling posture of subservience
is gone, marking members of this community as of equal standing. Every
Christian, not just the ordained, is worthy to handle the body of Christ.
The hierarchy of virtue, with some assumed to be more worthy than others,
is gone.

These changes symbolize a mature church with members treated as fully
of age, but the Catholic Church, alas, is not really like that. When the
further reforms of Vatican II were stymied by a reactionary pope and his
lackey bishops, the infantilizing culture of Catholicism survived. Such
church leaders love to speak of the church as a family, but always assuming
that they are the parents - ''Father'' - and everyone else is a child.

One of the reasons Catholics are in such shock at the betrayals by priests
and bishops is that Catholics continued to regard them, as children do
parents, as morally superior people. That they are not comes as a big
surprise. ''Father'' is mortal, too.

In fact, Catholics who have come so fully of age in other ways remain
religiously immature. Superbly educated in a range of diverse disciplines,
the Catholic laity tend to be theologically illiterate. Responsible for
universities, municipalities, companies, in church Catholic lay people
still do little more than take up the collection or arrange the flowers.
And when they have dared diverge from the paternalistic authority structure,
making their own decisions about birth control, for example, Catholics
have done so in the manner of adolescents, defying authority slyly rather
than openly.

In the face of the criminal Vatican rejection of condoms for HIV prevention,
Catholics have been passive instead of outraged. That Catholics seeking
divorce have willingly submitted to the humiliations and lies of the annulment
system is another signal of immaturity. By submitting to the paternalistic
church structure, otherwise adult Catholics have allowed the culture of
church dishonesty to worsen to the point of the present pathology. We
all share responsibility for this catastrophe.

But the present crisis makes it impossible for Catholics to continue
this childish arrangement. Once the myth of the perfect parent is broken,
the young can grow into adulthood, taking responsibility for themselves.
Catholics can never regard priests and bishops uncritically again, nor
can they cooperate any longer in the small dishonesties that have spawned
such massive betrayal.

Now when Catholics go to Mass, the already-in-place symbols of maturity
and equality must be matched with new political structures, which means,
of course, that the most ecclesiastically incorrect word of all must at
last be spoken aloud. The next time someone tells you the church is ''not
a democracy,'' reply that that is exactly the problem. Checks and balances,
due process, open procedures, elections, a fully educated community, freedom
of conscience, the right to dissent, authority as service instead of domination
- all of this must come into the church.

Here is the lesson: A power structure that is accountable only to itself
will always end by abusing the powerless. Even then, it will, paternalistically,
ask to be trusted to repair the damage. Never again. Not only the discredited
Cardinal Law must go, in other words, but the whole system that produced
him. Full democratic reform is the Catholic Church's only hope. If we
can take the body of Christ in hand, we can take the church in hand, too.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe on 5/14/2002.

The materials on BishopAccountability.org are offered solely for educational
purposes. Should any reader wish to quote or reproduce for sale any documents
to which other persons or institutions hold the rights, the original publisher
should be contacted and permission requested. If any original publisher
objects to our maintaining a cache of their documents for safekeeping,
we will gladly take down our cache of those documents and offer links
to the original publisher's posted versions instead.